Regarded by many as the spiritual leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Leonard Crow Dog played an influential role, beginning in the 1960s, in the effort to secure greater rights for Native peoples. A member of the Oglala Lakota, Crow Dog participated in numerous rallies and demonstrations across the country, and was often jailed in the process. He was also responsible for redirecting AIM's emphasis, speaking out not only for justice and tribal sovereignty, but also for the revitalization of traditional rituals and ceremonies that had waned in the recent past. His priorities shaped the Native American Self-Determination and Education Act, a landmark bill signed in 1975 that swung the pendulum away from acculturation and toward greater respect for cultural traditions. Crow Dog continues to write and give speeches and remains a conspicuous leader in the larger Native American community.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquisition made possible through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center.

Object number

NPG.2015.37

Exhibition Label

A forerunner in the fight against gender identity discrimination, Sylvia Rivera worked the dicey Times Square district as a trans woman sex worker after she was cast out by family as a teenager. She was there in 1969 at the turning point of the modern LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) struggle for equal rights, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn violently rebuffed a police raid. Politicized by this experience, Rivera campaigned with the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) in urging the city to enact a nondiscrimination ordinance. However, facing racism and discrimination as a Latina transgender by the mainly white male GAA leadership, she began to work with homeless teenagers, co-founding the militant group and shelter STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). In the 1990s Rivera was embraced as one of the fundamental figures of the LGBT movement. This portrait shows her flanked by her partner Julia Murray (right) and activist Christina Hayworth at the Saturday Rally before New York’s Gay Pride Parade in 2000.

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, in the fall of 1966. Having previously worked together at a neighborhood antipoverty center, the two hoped to prevent abusive behavior by local police and to provide assistance programs to the city’s poor African American residents. When Newton was jailed for the murder of a policeman, he and the Black Panthers became the national icon of militant black nationalists. Given the fiery rhetoric of its leaders, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was moved to describe the Panthers in 1969 as America’s greatest national security threat. By the time of Newton’s release on appeal in 1970, the Panthers had branch offices in more than thirty cities. In this poster by Emory Douglas, the Panthers’ minister of culture, Newton and Seale stand outside their Oakland headquarters.

In 1969, graphic designer Milton Glaser produced this poster advertising Dick Gregory’s comedy album for the Poppy label, The Light Side: The Dark Side. Gregory had begun his career as a standup comedian in the early 1960s in Chicago, part of an emerging generation of black comedians who drew on current events and racial issues for material. An appearance on The Tonight Show made him nationally famous. At the same time Gregory became an activist in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements and ran unsuccessfully for president in 1968. Gregory has remained an author and activist, often going on hunger strikes to show his commitment to various causes.

In an era when collecting decorative posters turned into “postermania,” Glaser produced a distinctive image with quirky stylization, bold, unexpected colors in the flesh tones, and a bifurcated, light-dark reference to the title.